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2. Working Remotely
by: Ehsan Zaman - iOS Developer, Blogger
Welcome! In this post, we’ll be discussing remote work. In the tech community, working remotely is very common as developers start out or transition - depending on where you are in your career - to contract roles where they prefer to work for themselves.
At CodeDoesGood we are all remote and often our team members will be in different time zones than us. Working from home and managing our workload without over working can be a hard thing to learn. Hopefully this post will aim to shed light as to how you can improve your productivity and work-life balance. I will primarily discuss my experience as a remote junior developer and mention some tips I’ve received over the past few months.
I mention this as the first topic because personally, I believe this is the most important. Everyone has a routine or ritual for almost everything they do yet we don’t think much about it because it’s ingrained as a habit and we function automatically. Think about when you were a student (or still are for some of you) and how you got ready for your day. It probably went something like this: brushing your teeth, having breakfast, getting dressed, double checking your backpack to ensure everything is there, and then heading out at a specific time so you won't be late or at least, too late. The same applies to whether you’re going to school, an onsite office job, or you guessed it - working remotely.
If you work remotely, you need to get into the habit or waking up and having a set schedule and time allotted in your day for when you’ll do work. Working remotely doesn't just mean that you’ll wake up and go right to your computer. That isn’t healthy and chances are you’ll be distracted for not going through some form a ritual. It's a good idea to treat your remote work the same as any other kind of work and give yourself a proper morning routine to wake up and start your day.
So before the week starts, have a game plan for how you will execute your tasks for the upcoming week. What are your goals and how long will they take to complete? How much time should be allotted to X task on X day? Having a rough idea of these scenarios will help big time. After that is done, realistically figure out when exactly you will start the working day. For those who work onsite, they know as they’ll go in at 9, have lunch at 12 or 1, and leave at or after 5. The same can apply if you work remotely, except you can change it to how you like. But have a plan and make sure it accounts for your morning rituals, breakfast, and anything else you typically do. After that, it’s time to work.
At CodeDoesGood we are all volunteering, some of us only have 5 hours a week to put in. Having a routine will help you make the most of the time you have available.
When you are working with a remote team, it’s important that you realistically assess your tasks and the estimates you make. Personally, I’ve learned the hard way where I thought that implementing certain features into an app wouldn’t be too difficult but I didn’t pay attention to the finer details. And because of that, I put myself in a position where I had to work much longer to ensure I get the task completed. There were a few instances where I was stuck and just decided to ask for extra time.
Luckily in your CodeDoesGood projects there will be no hard deadlines for Hatchlings but it is important to set realistic expectations with your team. When you first start making estimates you are going to be wrong but learn from your mistakes and your estimates will get better. And remember, it's important to note that your productively can correlate with your surrounding. So when working remotely, there is a chance that a task may take longer when working from home due to a lax environment or from not having a manager physically present and near you as you might have at your on-site job.
Although I’m a victim of this, I try to refrain from social media when I really need to work and get stuff done. So as developers, especially when doing remote project work, it’s very important to limit or cut out social media, news, and distractions. When you get into a routine, your brain conditions itself to be productive and to be in work mode. So, as soon as you get the urge to go on Facebook, your mindset shifts. This is called context switching and context switching is a killer to productivity.
As I mentioned, this is an issue that I have personally faced and I’ve tried to mitigate it through timed breaks (once an hour or every few hours) where I only check Slack, Facebook, texts, news, etc. This way, I give myself a break and I know that I’m not in work mode. Additionally, to expand on not being in work mode, I even go to another room to disassociate myself from my work environment - my desk. By doing this, I’m only associating my desk with work.
Speaking of breaks, lets segue and discuss it more in detail.
When you work in an office, chances are you will take breaks - whether it is for the bathroom, water, to bug a friend at work, coffee, overhearing someone nearby making a joke - it happens. But those are typically done intentionally too because it’s healthy to spend a few minutes away from your desk to unwind, regroup, and give your brain a break. The same concept applies for anyone who works remotely. If you spend hours looking at a laptop trying to fix a bug, or read through documentation, you'll actually end up less productive for not taking a break.
So take breaks! But take them away from your normal working environment. Move to the couch for example. This will help your brain stay conditioned to work mode when working and to break mode when you need a break.